How to improve your grammar collocation

By Diane Hall

Introduction Collocation in English, i.e. words that go together, can cause problems for both students and teachers. The main reasons for this are: collocations vary a lot, e.g. you can have strong coffee but not strong soup collocations are different from language to language there are no rules for collocation; you just have to learn them!

What is a collocation? Collocations have been described as the company that words keep. A collocation is two or more words that occur together regularly. A collocation can be tight, i.e. fixed and almost idiomatic, e.g. painfully shy, a snap decision, shrug your shoulders. These phrases are common and the words in them tend not to form too many other collocations. A collocation can also be loose, i.e. it consists of words that form lots of other collocations. An example is a good time = we can also say a great/fantastic/wonderful/bad/terrible time and a good holiday/job/sleep. Most collocations fall between the really tight and really loose, e.g. break the rules, run a business, strong coffee, absolutely brilliant.

Collocations can include nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs adjective + noun: heavy traffic, great difficulty, bad luck verb + noun: take a photo, do (someone) a favour, lay the table adverb + adjective: painfully shy, highly qualified, deeply embarrassed

Words in collocations can have different senses in different collocations: collocation run a business a race the risk of dry bread humour run meaning of word run = organise, be in charge of run = move fast idiomatic = face a negative outcome dry = stale dry = subtle, without appearing to be funny idiomatic = practice for an event

Author: Diane Hall r: Pearson Education 2010 Katie Jones.

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How to improve your grammar collocation

Collocations do not necessarily appear in combinations where you might expect them, for example, we say break the rules, but not break the regulations; we talk about heavy rain but not heavy wind and we have a light meal but not a *light drink.

Finally, words in collocations dont have to appear next to each other, e.g. I prefer strong coffee./I like my coffee to be strong./This is a really strong, aromatic type of coffee. She runs a shop. /The shop shes running at present .../She ran an interesting little shoe shop.

How can I learn and remember collocations? The first thing is to check your collocations! Its easy to translate from ones own language, but it may be incorrect, e.g. in English we make a mistake, not *do a mistake. You can check for collocations in a good dictionary such as the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, but you may have to check each word of the collocation. An alternative is to use a collocation website. Just type collocation into a search engine. A particularly good one is JustTheWord, which is very easy to use. If you type in mood, for example, it displays all the collocations divided into grammatical type, e.g. adjective + noun (bad mood, dark mood), noun + verb (a persons mood changes, darkens, swings), noun + noun (holiday mood, party mood).

These ways of recording collocations may help you to remember them:

1 Grids One way of recording collocations is to group similar meanings into a grid: mood good bad foul dark relaxed high low atmosphere temper spirits

Author: Diane Hall r: Pearson Education 2010 Katie Jones.

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How to improve your grammar collocation

This shows you that you can be in a foul mood or foul temper, but not in foul spirits.

2 Word forks You can use word forks to show collocations that precede or follow a particular word:

3 Opposites One way of remembering collocations is to learn them in opposite pairs, particularly those that involve adjectives, e.g. heavy rain light rain great success little success strong argument weak argument

How can I teach collocations? Obviously you can encourage your students to record collocations as they come across them, using the techniques described above, and to check in a dictionary if they are not sure of a collocation. You could encourage them to use dictionaries to build up collocation charts, like the one below, of words they have recently learnt.

Collocations with decision verbs make a decision, take a decision, reach a decision, come to a decision adjectives the right/wrong decision, a big/major decision, a difficult/tough decision idiomatic collocations a snap decision, my/his decision is final

Author: Diane Hall r: Pearson Education 2010 Katie Jones.

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How to improve your grammar collocation

Otherwise, there are some fairly simple exercises to help your students learn collocations: 1 Odd one out Ask our students to find the word in a list that goes with a key word: tell ... a word / a speech / a joke / a language Then ask them to provide the correct verbs that collocate with the other options: say a word / make or give a speech / speak a language. Or you could ask students to find the word that doesnt go with a key word: tell ... a joke / a promise / a story / the truth and ask them to provide the correct collocation for that word: make a promise.

2 Identifying incorrect collocations Students find the incorrect collocations in a text and correct them:
bad Ive just come back from the inter-school sports competition chaos! I suppose we had light luck heavy organisation was terrible. strong with the weather, as there was strong rain and heavy wind for most of the day, but the

3 Gap fill from boxes This is a gap fill where collocations

of the same type (e.g. adverb + adjective) are supplied with the words in separate boxes:
Adverbs: bitterly heavily highly painfully utterly

Adjectives: aware

cold

contagious

criticised

destroyed

This winters flu virus proved to be _highly_ _contagious_. It really has been a _bitterly_ _cold_ winter. The authorities have been _heavily_ _criticised_ for not taking action sooner.

Author: Diane Hall r: Pearson Education 2010 Katie Jones.

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